Janice A. Lowe, Cleveland

(F) RICAN DREAM

cat calls

living wall lynch law

open carry “woof of the heritage of the West”-Baldwin

 I.

re                                 who’s South?              hollow in ground

crime

 

I am                            Quechua talk

Made

 

Rare

Rican                           or                                Yucatan

 

Mare                           sleepwalk

Med

 

Ream

Air                               re-dis-member the Americas and in-betweens

 

Name

Rain                            borders                                  positioning

 

Dam

Merde                         Vancouver                              self of Central

 

Rice

Cane

 

Rad                             altitude

Ma

 

Red

Cam                            dreamed directions

 

Cram

Aim

 

Rim                             four

II.

i-tears

flossy summer rain

re-crash

 

Cracked bed bottom

Webby

Trapped blap

Blip perfect gone

Scope of scooped sun

A leg-cicle

Body of M

Fracture

Backwards

Our LEG ad libs

Tubes

BRidge

Teeth

Fall

Like mountains

 

 

 

cris cheek, Cleveland

even the ire

 

crashed

 

exhausted and broken

 

 

c

 

Daniel Gray-Kontar, Cleveland

I.

So when I think about the American Dream, as I’ve been doing since the Republican National Convention has arrived into Cleveland, I’m forced to think about all of the discourse that has emerged in the past several weeks. So much of it has been about Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and so many of the personalities representing the two political parties vying for political power in our country. And while the arrival of RNC has inspired so much of my thinking, and is, in fact, the catalyst for this writing and reflection, I’m forced to remember that the American Dream has very little to do with any of these personalities. It has little to do, in fact, with political parties. The American Dream is about the beautiful battle of narratives, which crystalize into ideologies. It is about the fact that The American Dream is about one’s capacity to speak the truth of one’s personal and collective narrative without fear. It is, further, about the capacity to speak one’s own truth, to associate with others who share your truth, and to engage in discussion and debate with others who do not share your truth, your backstory, your understanding of what it means to be, of what it means to engage in the struggle for self-actualization and self-determination. This is The American Dream. And too, the constant questioning of whether or not the American Dream is being realized is a part of the American Dream.

And so … As I sit in front of an ice sculpture of the words “AMERICAN DREAM” melting in the sun – a sculpture which is designed to force us to question our personal understanding of its meaning – I realize that as long as we live in a society in which we are able to create works of art that force us to question who and what we are, why we are, how we are, and where we are going – if we are allowed to freely question, to freely answer, and to freely act upon our reflections within the context of acting in ways that are not harmful to our shared Republic — we are living the Dream. The moment that for any of us, we are no longer able to engage in this kind of relentless critique, then we are no longer engaged in the pursuit or actualization of that dream. And so we must question, not only what is The American Dream, but who amongst us is not allowed to live it; why are they not allowed to live it, and how we must respond and react in a way that upholds the meaning of our collective Dream as human beings who call themselves (or do not, by choice) American.

 

II.

The Dream

 

Many are inside, but do not see.

See, but do not speak.

Speak, but do not know.

Know, but do not feel.

Feel, but do not touch.

Touch, but do not reach.

Reach, but do not hear.

Hear, but do not listen.

Listen, but are outsiders

(or so, they have been told).

 

Many are inside, but do not see …

Carla Harryman, Cleveland

5:00

There isn’t much left of The American Dream ice sculpture. It has melted more quickly than anticipated. While we had imagined the emergence of new linguistic possibilities and indications of morphological promise, what happened resulted in a series of abrupt explosions leaving truncated limbs of letter supported on serifs. What remains are the thinning letters ERI DRE. How might I represent this effect visually in a word program? ERI __+)*~=_DRE.  To work with the remains of explosive collapse beyond a cursory comment or gesture here or there, may take more time than what is left in this day.

A comment just overheard included the criticism that any message that takes time, more than a couple of seconds to assimilate,  is not revolutionary.

5:44

Drawn to the dynamics of destruction and “making,” I had been planning on an impossible project that would use textual excerpts taken from the 1920s and 1930s. My thought was to write some translations and alterations beginning around the time the ice began to melt.

The time of composition moves slowly while ice melts more quickly in summer sun. Thus I have concluded with one alteration, a collaboration between John Maynard Keynes and Gertrude Stein:

So then as I was saying it is very confusing and sometimes in them, the kind of sensitiveness in them from many pseudo moral principles which have weighed down on us for there is in each kind of being, in independent dependent being, for 200 years and through which we have lavishly raised some in dependent independent being of the most repellent human qualities to the rank of virtues a kind of way of yielding

from The Making of Americans (1925) and Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930) as quoted in Utopia Toolbox. 1 by Juliane Stiegele

 

‘the american dream’

stood awhile

 

then began to crash, lit from below perhaps

 

i hear a voice say, “it said, The American Dream”

 

 

i expected all all manner of deconstruction

 

 

dream went

 

 

cris cheek, Cleveland

of the disintegrating dreams of the disintegrating american

“It’s the American Dream baby, the baby American dreaming of a baby American baby”

 

cris cheek, Cleveland

Carla Harryman, Cleveland

1:24

The American Dream is melting here on the corner of Church Street and W. 29 in Cleveland

1:35

As I was stating to cris cheek the other day as we discussed the durational project of our witnessing its meltdown, I only have antagonistic associations with the phrase, whose codification arrives in the early 1930s, or perhaps in the 1920s.

2:00

My view of the phrase as a cover for nationalistic ideology, exceptionalism, and its multiple histories and currencies of violence, in some company goes without stating. Whatever is happening just down the road says it all.

This reference to down the road is open to projection.  But “you know what I mean.” I mean, when was the last time one listened when TAD was invoked? What do I attune to in its disappearance? Ta ta old man!  Though M whom I conversed with earlier today would comment with a sense of her particular immigrant circumstance that it’s going to mean something different for everyone.  Just now someone on the green is noting that it lends itself to isolationism. My sense is M does not want to see it go, and for her, the anti-immigration hyperbole down the road is the source of its disappearance.

I search for the language
that is also yours—

almost all our language has been taxed by war.

–Allen Ginsberg

2:32:

But here the physical, digital, and conceptual meet, and the ice sculpture is already showing signs of fragility. Its prism thinning, the ice letters become more transparent to the band aid-colored paint of a neighborhood building. The shadow moves to purple.

The disparity of wealth makes history.

.

“The shape of the letters causes them to bear weight differently”

‘But there has also been the American Dream, that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth for position.’

James Truslow Adams, The American Dream 1931. Adams introduces the phrase ‘the American Dream’ into print in the Epilogue to his book.

 

Note, pressure on gender and ‘innately’ in this passage

 

cris cheek, Cleveland

Mary E. Weems, Cleveland

Amistad

Myth

Erection

Republic

Indian Killing

Christian

Atheists

Narrow

Dirt

Rape

Erase

Antithesis

Murder

***

American Dream

I’ve never had one

word without African

empty as whole waiting for something.

***

The American Ream

***

American Musical

Gene Kelly Dances across letters

he is also ice

his feet fast

begin to melt

he is ankles hobbling

over AMERICAN

he is on his knees

his prayer is drips

on the sidewalk

the letters are lit like a Broadway sign

all light white

Gene Kelly is the light

turns

turns it out

melts.

***

Watching the letters drip like sweat on a slave’s, sharecropper’s, [ill]egal

immigrant’s back, I notice

how it disappears like opportunity in America.

***

Letters are clear

shaped like ones

on American money

ancestors appear

in space between

faces misshapen puzzles

mouths open

hands touching a letter

The three A’s become shadows

strangers landing no shore.

***

Ice impermanent as the middle class

as out of place as waste.

***